Everybody knows that 9.99 is just ten dollars.

Everybody knows that 9.99 is just ten dollars. I mean you know this, so why do brands still use it? See the thing that nobody ever talks about is that this wasn't even invented by a marketer. It wasn't even invented by a psychologist. It was actually invented because cashiers were simply stealing money. So in the 1880s, if something cost a flat dollar, someone could just easily put it in their pocket and they never had to touch the register. So business owners got clever. They started pricing things at 99 cents. This way the cashier had to open the drawer and give people change. That was it. Simply to create a paper trail. But then customers started spending way more than they needed to. Nobody really understood why, so they just started putting nines on everything and their revenue just kept going up. But then, eventually, psychologist did decide to study this but it wasn't until like a hundred years later. And what they found was that essentially your brain reads from left to right. And what happens is that it locks into the first number before it even reads the full number. So by the time that you have seen the 9.99 your brain has already filed this as not ten dollars but nine dollars. That's why three dollars and sixty cents versus three dollars and 61 cents feels like the exact same price because you locked on to the three. But that's not even the craziest part. So then they run another study with the same product but three different prices, 34, 39 and 44. And it turns out that the one that sold the most was 39. Now this one didn't have the point 99 at the end, but what they found is that after a hundred years of seeing nines everywhere, a price ending in nine also signals something else. It says that somebody tried giving you the best possible price that they could. And so you see it and you automatically think it's a deal even if it's really not. But the craziest thing of all, is that this marketing trick works the best on things that you have never bought before. Like a new product that you have no idea what it really should cost. Your brain essentially hands full control to this signal. And so the nine becomes one of the things that tells your brain to trust the product. So a trick invented in the 1880s to catch thieves that nobody understood for over a hundred years is the reason every price you see today still has a nine.